Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC)

The University of Iowa is also one of the 15 members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), sometimes known as the "academic Big Ten." The CIC comprises all of the Big Ten universities listed above plus the

UI Peer Group

Because the members of the Big Ten and CIC differ from one another in a variety of ways (for example, some campuses have large health sciences centers and others do not), the University of Iowa regularly uses an "official UI Peer Group" to benchmark itself against other, similar, institutions.

The university formed the official UI Peer Group in the mid-1980s, and the Board of Regents, State of Iowa approved it. It included all of the public universities in the Big Ten at the time (Penn State was not yet a member), except for Michigan State and Purdue, which did not have comparable health science centers. In addition, four comparable campuses from various geographical regions of the country were added.

Regents Comparison Group

In some reports, at the request of the Board of Regents, State of Iowa, The University of Iowa provides comparison benchmarking data for a group that includes all of the Big Ten public universities plus the four non-Big Ten universities that are part of the official UI Peer Group: Arizona, UCLA, North Carolina, and Texas.